You're invited: "Why Startups Fail", a Ubiquity event with HBS Professor Tom Eisenmann on Thursday, September 28

Most start-ups don’t succeed: More than two-thirds of them never deliver a positive return to investors. But why do so many end disappointingly?

Aug 23, 2023

"Why Startups Fail: Featuring Sunil’s 2010 False Start and Other Founders’ Stories"

Join us the morning of Thursday, September 28 to explore Why Startups Fail with Harvard Business School Professor Tom Eisenmann & Ubiquity Ventures’ Sunil Nagaraj.
Most start-ups don’t succeed: More than two-thirds of them never deliver a positive return to investors. But why do so many end disappointingly?
After 24 years as a Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, Tom Eisenmann became obsessed with this question. In his recent book “Why Startups Fail” and accompanying Harvard Business Review article, Tom goes into his findings after his multi-year research project, specifically several distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.
In this Ubiquity Ventures event, Tom will focus on the failure patterns most common among early-stage startups:
Bad Bedfellows: Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly.
False Starts: In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions.
False Positives: Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand.
Ubiquity’s own Sunil Nagaraj is the topic of one chapter/pattern in the book: False Starts. Tom will dig into this particular failure pattern by interviewing Sunil Nagaraj to explore the nuances of his 2010 startup Triangulate and how the “false starts” dynamic eventually led to this startup’s failure.
Come away from this event with frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them.
Bonus: All attendees will receive a free copy of Tom Eisenmann’s book “Why Startups Fail”.

Thursday, September 28th, 11:00am-12:00pm Pacific Time / 2:00pm-3:00pm Eastern Time.

You will be sent a calendar invite with the Zoom link when you register. Register now at https://fail.ubiquity.vc

About Tom Eisenmann

Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he’s led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.

Ubiquity Ventures — led by Sunil Nagaraj — is a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on startups solving real-world physical problems with "software beyond the screen", often using smart hardware or machine learning.

If your startup fits this description, fill out the 60-second Ubiquity pitch form and you’ll hear back within 24 hours.

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